Phil Foden provides energy and precision as classic Pep-ball prevails

I t felt fitting, in the end, that Phil Foden should have a decisive hand. On a taught, sweaty, occasionally indigestible night at the Ataturk Olympic Stadium Manchester City finally turned the whole world a shade of sky blue, reaching the end point, the final high, of this extraordinary 15-year football-industrial project.

City are champions of Europe. If this always seemed inevitable in the abstract, it still feels like moment of double-take, of pure sporting vertigo. A team playing in the same clothes as the one that seemed for so long the embodiment of gallows humour, familiar underachievement, a roll of the eyes in human form, are now indisputably, and by some distance judged on the season as a whole, the greatest football team on the planet.

It was fitting that the only goal in this win should come not from some rapier thrust, or the more direct route to goal of the last few months, but from a kind of old-school infiltration. This was a goal made out of the rhythms and shapes of classic Pep-ball, fashioned by a pair of scuttling inside forwards and finished in Guardiola-gold style by a defensive midfielder.

Mainly though there was a soft, fond note in the fact that the night should be rescued just as it started to wander away from them by an hour-long intervention from a homegrown asset who started on the bench but ended up leading the charge from the front.

The most obvious moment of jeopardy arrived with half an hour gone, and City already fighting to impose their rhythms, as Kevin De Bruyne abruptly sat down outside the Inter box, got up, tried to walk a few steps, then sat down again, face already drained.

Pep Guardiola felt it straight away, felt that fissure starting to open up, leaping and suddenly, arms